Workplace quitting is at an all-time high. Over the past few years, more and more employees have begun to realize the value that they produce, wanting fair recompensation. Especially within the US, the current economic climate is forcing employees to continually switch jobs to find the best possible packages for them.
The US is currently experiencing its highest inflation rate since 1982. Yet, corporate profits are currently at an all-time high in 2022, meaning corporate greed of increasing prices without paying workers more is leading to unfavorable circumstances for everyone apart from those right at the top.
One of the leading reasons that employees are starting to leave their positions is a general feeling of stagnation. Employees need to have a clear pathway toward earning more money, otherwise, they’ll simply move to another company that is offering them more. A fantastic way of creating this structure is by investing in workplace education.
By incorporating a structure of education within your workplace, you can create employees that produce more value. As they become more valuable to your business and produce more, you can then increase their salary, helping to keep both you and them as happy as possible.
Yet, creating a new workplace culture doesn’t happen overnight, and forcing people to take educational modules might not go over well. If you want this change to happen, you need to make employee development a part of your workplace culture. In this article, we’ll outline exactly how you can do so.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Employee Development?
An employee development system within your business is a structure that you have in place to ensure that your workers are continually building their skills and knowledge. Whether they’re learning a new skill/tool or maybe honing a core part of their job description, this process helps you create better employees.
While you get a better team to rely on, employee development also helps employees become more competitive as candidates. With a wider array of skills, they’re more prepared for the workplace, helping them offer more to any business. This often will lead to them getting promoted in your company to reflect the range of additional skills they’re now bringing to the table.
It’s important to note that employee development isn’t just mandatory employee training. While you could have fire training for all employees, that module doesn’t improve any employee skills. On the contrary, employee development is all about improving skills or honing knowledge of a specific area.
Why Should My Business Focus on Employee Development?
At its core, employee development is all about making your workplace as effective as possible. Instead of having to search for candidates with specific skills, you can train your teams to take on any role you’d like.
This internal learning also fosters a sense of workplace loyalty, which can further help you retain your top talent. Employees that have gone through a series of development systems are often more productive, more effective, and better at their jobs.
A study from CSO Insights revealed that sales managers that had undergone employee development practices routinely outperform those without this educational framework. In fact, this change was so drastic that developed employees were routinely pulling in over 20% more revenue than other employees.
Investing in employee development is a complete win-win for your business.
Three Steps To Change Your Company Culture to Incorporate Development
If you’re looking to incorporate employee development into your business, there are a range of ways you can do so. While you could create new learning modules and allocate them to different employees, this doesn’t create a motivation to learn. Instead, you need to change the culture your business exists within.
Here are three steps that you can follow to start to shift your company culture to favor employee development:
- Start on-the-job-training
- Outline Promotion Requirements
- Create a Mentor Program
Let’s break these down further:
Start on-the-job-training
What is on-the-job-training? On-the-job training is where you include practical elements of learning within the routine 9-5 of your employees. Instead of setting them theory modules to complete in their own time, you’re creating circumstances where they can truly learn on the job.
For example, if you wanted to train a high-potential employee in leadership, they could shadow a manager for a day. After that, they could then have a trial day where they put what they learned to the test. A final day would be all about reflection and pinpointing what could have gone better. Practical learning like this can rapidly boost learning efficiency.
Learning by doing will help your employees hit the ground running.
Outline Promotion Requirements
Motivation is often a key factor that you need to make your workplace culture care about learning. If people aren’t motivated to learn, they simply won’t. A great way of ensuring people take this seriously is to include educational development as a main box to check to get a promotion.
If people have to demonstrate proficiency in a skill that you offer via training in order to get a promotion, people will be clamoring to get that specific training.
Create a Mentor Program
Finally, creating a mentor program can help make learning and teaching natural parts of your workplace. Pair up employees that are at different stages of the same career path.
Having a mentor that’s higher up in the company will help more junior employees clearly see what skills they need to develop to move up. This will create motivation and help people to accept employee development as a serious part of their jobs.
Final Thoughts
Making employee development a core part of how your business operates is one of the best ways of getting more out of your employees while also enriching their experience with your company. By demystifying the progression process in your business and making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to move up through education, you’re creating a workplace culture that’s more likely to stay with your company.
In this era of jumping from company to company as if it were nothing, you need to do everything you can to keep your employees happy. By ensuring they go through educational processes, you’re able to create a more efficient, effective, and knowledgeable base of employees. From there, your overall output and business productivity can skyrocket.
Employee development is the leading way that you can keep up with your competitors in this current economic market. For better employees, workplace loyalty, and an increase in employee satisfaction, invest in development.
